As used herein, “broadcast” refers to any sort of electronic transmission of signals from a source to multiple receiving devices. Thus, a “broadcast” may be a cable broadcast, a satellite broadcast, a terrestrial broadcast, a traditional free television broadcast, a radio broadcast, and/or an internet broadcast, and a “broadcaster” may be any entity that transmits signals for reception by a plurality of receiving devices. The signals may include content, (also referred to herein as “programs”), and/or commercials (also referred to herein as “advertisements”). An “advertiser” is any entity that provides an advertisement for inclusion in a broadcast signal.
Companies that rely on broadcast video and/or audio programs for revenue, such as advertisers, television networks and content providers, wish to know the size and demographic composition of the audience(s) that consume program(s). Audience measurement companies typically address this need by measuring the demographic composition of a set of statistically selected households and the program consumption habits of the member(s) of those households. For example, audience measurement companies may collect viewing data on a selected household by monitoring the content displayed on that household's television(s) and by identifying which household member(s) are present in the room when that content is displayed.
Gathering this audience measurement data has become more difficult as the diversity of broadcast systems has increased. For example, while it was once the case that television broadcasts were almost entirely radio frequency, terrestrial based, broadcast systems (i.e., traditional free television), in recent years cable and satellite broadcast systems have become commonplace. Further, these cable and/or satellite based broadcast systems often require the use of a dedicated receiving device such as a set top box or an integrated receiver decoder to tune, decode, and display broadcast programs. To complicate matters further, these receiving devices for alternative broadcast systems as well as other receiving devices such as local media playback devices (e.g., video cassette recorders, digital video recorders, and personal video recorders) have made time shifted viewing of broadcast and other programs possible.
For example, prior to the advent of these devices, televisions were used solely for real-time viewing of tuned broadcast programs. As such, an audience measurement company could monitor all of the television viewing for a given television set by monitoring the channel to which the television tuner was tuned. However, when a receiving device is employed, it has a tuner of its own. Therefore, the tuned channel of the television may not be indicative of the program being viewed by the audience. For instance, a television tuned to a particular channel (e.g., 3 or 4) may not be displaying a program it has tuned, but may instead be displaying a program tuned by an external receiving device on a completely different channel, a recorded program played from a tape, a digital versatile disk (DVD) or hard disk drive, or a program played from another source. Thus, the presence of receiving devices such as set top boxes, integrated receiver decoders, VCRs, digital video recorder, etc. complicates the audience monitoring process.
Because of the possible discrepancy between the channel tuned by the television and the program actually presented on the television, it has been proposed to use software meters within receiving devices such as set top boxes. A software meter is a program (i.e., a collection of machine readable instructions such as software or firmware) that, when executed, cause a processor or other logic device to collect and store tuning data. Such software meters have been employed in receiving devices that are particularly constructed to host the same. However, not all receiving devices have been constructed to host such a software meter. Thus, while some receiving devices have the processing capability to host a software meter and the memory resources to store tuning data collected by such a software meter, because such devices where not constructed with the intent of hosting a software meter, many such receiving devices have no output port intended to output such tuning data.